(if you touch me) you'll understand what happiness is
by Cerberusia
Summary: The street which your flat's on has only four streetlamps...The world has an edge of unreality, surreality: you feel like there ought to be a saxophone playing. You think you're a bit tipsy. Sirius/Regulus.


The street which your flat's on has only four streetlamps. One is directly outside your building, in which you rent a comfortably-appointed place on the first floor, paid for with a Muggle bank account filled with money that doesn't come from anywhere. It's just past midnight, and you're back from - doing nothing in particular, really. Just out for a stroll around London in your Muggle clothes, breathing in the second-hand smoke, thick with carcinogens instead of powdered dragon scale. Just another man in the faceless masses. In bars, when people ask, you say you're not really a uni kind of bloke, which is true. Sometimes you say you're training for the police, and if they say their brother's in it's okay because you give a fake name - different one every time. You're going to get found out one of these days. You don't think you care.

The streetlamps flicker, and you know immediately. When the fluorescent light returns, there's a figure underneath your lamp, just in front of your flat. Could be a Death Eater, here to do you in for Mouldy Voldy - no-one's supposed to know where you live, but you know how people get sloppy.

But really, you know that stance. Hands in pockets, straight-backed but still managing to appear hunched: paradoxically both proud and self-effacing. Alternatively, a yellow-bellied coward with a head full of pureblood nonsense. You walk up to your flat like he's not there, rummage through your pockets for your keys. The world has an edge of unreality, surreality: you feel like there ought to be a saxophone playing in the background. You think you're a bit tipsy.

You ignore him as you open the door onto the familiar corridor and step inside. You hear him follow you and lock the door with magic, but you don't turn around as you walk up the stairs and through the door of your flat. The click of the door and the tiny spark of the nonverbal locking charm send a frisson through you. You take off your jacket - leather, your third most prized possession after your wand and your life, edging out even the motorbike - and hang it up neatly on the peg by the door. You're never this neat when you're by yourself.

He lets you get your shoes off before coming up behind you, hand hovering an inch from your shoulderblade. He's not touching you, but you feel the imprint of his slight body against yours. You drop the boots - big, black and steel-toed - straighten up and head for your bedroom. Again, he follows closely at your shoulder. He must be eager, because as soon as the door closes he wraps his arms around your waist, nuzzling your shoulder and neck. He's shorter than you, so you have to lean back a bit to make it comfortable. You don't mind. Older brothers have to make sacrifices.

You don't have that long, but Regulus shows no sign of hurrying up. Typical - Reggie never could get to the point. It took two specialists a good year to cure his stammer, and even now it comes back when he forgets to speak slowly and properly. You figure he sounds stupid either way, which is why you don't speak during these encounters. Partly why, anyway - the main reason is that if you started talking you'd never stop, and it'd all end in shouting and on Reggie's part crying (and perhaps on yours, once the door shut) and you might not have _this_ any more and sometimes you think that _this_ is the only constant in your life that isn't casting gruesome hexes or holding hushed, near-frantic conversations or torturing men until they scream.

You sometimes wonder if Regulus feels the same.

So you reach back to grab his arm and pull him towards the bed, pull him down and roll on top of him. He squirms, but you know he likes it. He cranes his neck up for a kiss, and you give it him before he pulls something. By now he knows how to kiss you so you don't pull away and roll your eyes. You're not much of a kisser when you don't have to be - too impatient, rushing headlong into _life_ - but Regulus is. You think Regulus would be happy to kiss you for an hour, if you asked - but then, Regulus would probably lick your boots if you asked right. You dig your fingers lightly into his neck, feel him press up against them and you, and marvel at how _easy_ he is. A bit of kissing, a bit of pain, and he turns compliant and eager under you - the best possible material for the devil to work with.

You dig your nails in harder. Regulus spreads his legs.

When you first did this, Reggie tried to take all his clothes off, wanting to be skin-to-skin, intimate. You didn't let him then or any of the times after that, just pulled down his jeans - and Merlin only knows how he got hold of Muggle clothes, or why - around his knees and shoved a hand up his shirt to pinch his tits. His ears went red with shame, but you saw his face twist in that way that meant he liked it and was ashamed to like it and liked being ashamed and was probably ashamed of that too. And that was when you decided that Regulus was at a whole new level of fucked-up that you would never be able to fully comprehend, and settled for humiliating him when you could and watching him squirm in shame and pleasure.

Tonight, though, you're feeling just indulgent enough and maybe just lonely enough to lean back and start stripping him of his t-shirt. It takes Regulus a moment to understand this diversion from the usual script, but once he gets it he immediately starts removing his clothes as fast as he can, and when he's down to his underwear he starts on yours too. You let him, since he so obviously enjoys it, even darting in to press a kiss to your bare shoulder - honestly, he's like a puppy - until his fingers rest on the waistband of your underwear, waiting uncertainly.

You hook your thumbs in and pull them down yourself, slowly, watching Regulus' face. It's a bit weird and feels sort of like you're an 'exotic dancer' or whatever the fuck they call strippers these days, but Reggie's undeniably into it. He doesn't see you like this - you always fuck him from behind - so you suppose he's entitled to a bit of a stare. You see his mouth open, not like he's going to speak, but like he's imagining your cock in his mouth. Maybe one day.

But it's stalling the action, and the heating's not on in the flat besides (and you have a tacit no-wands agreement, so Heating Charms are right out), so you nod down at his remaining underwear. _Get it off, then._ Not that they leave much to the imagination - where the hell did he get them? You suppose you'll probably never find out.

Regulus flushes blotchily, but takes a breath, closes his eyes and slowly eases his pants down his skinny thighs to reveal his flushed cock. This close, you can see wetness glistening at the tip. The silence has grown thick and heavy. You feel tension thrumming in your shoulders. Quickly, you take his shoulders to turn him on his hands and knees. Having to slick him up the Muggle way isn't as much of a chore as usual because, naked, you can see him clench and tense his thighs when you spread the gel between his cheeks and over his perineum. The expansion and contraction of his ribcage is hypnotic, and you reach forward with your clean hand to pinch and tug his nipple. You'd slap anyone who tried that on you, but Regulus' mouth opens in a silent moan and he tries to rub his thighs together. You stop him so you can slide your cock between them, and he draws them tightly together again. He keeps making small, aborted movements, moving his hips from side-to-side, like he wants you in him instead of between his thighs. But that's not how this works.

You fuck him quickly, how you both like. You don't entirely get how he gets off on this, since you're nowhere near his cock or in his arse, but he keeps pressing back against you and rocking back and forth, so you guess it's a mental thing. It's not as good as being inside a girl, but it's strangely intimate. You couldn't do this with anyone else: you don't even fuck the girls you bring home naked, always at least keep a shirt on. The cool air pricks at your skin.

When you come, you slump to lie half on top of him. Regulus' immediately collapses - elbows probably given out after holding himself up for so long - and he rolls onto his side so you're spooning him, one leg still thrown over his. You reach around to take a little of your come and his cock in your hand, and this close you hear the soft aspiration- _haa_. Reggie's easy to get off: you stroke him hard and fast, bite at his neck a little and feel him tense when he gets close. He comes with a rough, throttled noise, quickly cut-off. It's the loudest you've ever got him to be.

In less than a minute, you'll have to roll off him and he'll have to start putting his clothes back on. It feels almost like having an affair. But right now, you do what you always do after, because you don't trust your words but your body knows just what to say, and take his fair hand to place a dry, soft kiss upon the back of it, like a knight valiant or suppliant. You can smell his woody cologne mixed with his sharp sweat.

Eventually, of course, he wriggles out from underneath you and you roll onto your back to watch him dress. He's got both your come on his belly, glistening in the dim light, but he doesn't clean himself up, just pulls his t-shirt down over it.

He gives you a once-over before he goes, eyes tracing your face, then your naked body, carelessly displayed. What does he see when he looks at you? You don't know any more. You hardly even care. You hardly care about anything these days except staying alive, and sometimes even that doesn't look like such a great prospect - you're alive, but you're not _living_. He opens his mouth, licks his lips, looks you right in the eye, and for one stomach-churning moment you think he's going to speak - but he closes his mouth again, drops his eyes and leaves. The click of the door sounds muted in the heavy silence.

You never shut the curtains. Outside, you can see the dim yellow glow of the streetlamps. Maybe if you pulled yourself upright you would see a figure again illuminated. Maybe that figure would have its face upturned to your window, not as if to the sun, but as if to the moon.

You don't, of course. That would be stupid. Or sentimental, which amounts to the same thing nowadays. Instead, you take your wand to clean up your bed, even as something in your mind catches on the idea of Regulus' come on your sheets, and, since you're not going to get any sleep for a good few hours, a pile of official-looking paperwork from the stack on the desk. You've got a counter-revolution to plan, after all.

(On the other side of London, in a big old house belonging to a big old family, your brother touches your come on his stomach and sighs for something he can't name. Separate, together, you wait for rosy-fingered dawn).


End file.
